mousebirds fly unwanted in our gardens

vervets steal the purple blotching of our passion,

drop litter-rinds like evidence of our injustice

mango strands lodge in our teeth,

unnoticed for weeks

housesnakes curl in water meters,

shed skin like our empty hoses

lakes shrivel up to a rose,

forgotten in promise of the west

sold for more than it could afford

yet the rains last longer than they did

as the ocean floods in rebirth, an age

will come of this, history will learn

from our briny bones…

or so we are told.

The poet’s Breath

In crystal vases,

the jojoba sleek of mind

left out for weeks, extracts

the expression of essence 

with the release of the sun,

I watch scent waft in plumes

that collect the slue of vision

lemongrass and leleshwa

sprinkled and forgotten, remember 

themselves in the plasma air

shape droplets on the inside of glass,

my world contained from afar 

and when they rest,

stirred from the sunlight

exuding from my touch, 

they fall on the well of skin

immortal, like perfumes stilling  

the life behind my words

A teacher’s lost property

barefoot soul, sketched

through chicken wire lenses
floats in spaces criss-cross

vexing her body,

as the pixel splattered

frey of her borderless image

stirs shy dust with the pulse

undulating earth into the clover

clouds, she palm pockets, above

the valley’s tread of herself

where they peer at her, behind

the stare she has learned not see,

she falls under night, green

glowing larval markings

defend her mapped moist wings

and she hatches a face

with the dark’s parasitic grains,

crests a butterfly in the waves

her wingwind orchestrates-

surging in dream

she sees them playing,

begging to invent the infinite

incapacity of her world;

and so, the unconscious stirring

stippling her shadow


the more

it’s light is hidden

barefoot soul, live

in the art the word

has taught us to forget


Wind speaks in the brush of breath,
teases leaves like years swung

in the palm of a monkey

Dogs chase their tails,
when tiring of their own

no longer know what to do
with the carmine flies, dancing
around the delicacy of a dead body

bark at nothing to senseless
ears, but are there not worlds
drummed in what we cannot hear?

Insects tap heartbeats on the earth,
our skin, water navigates rivered
dolphins when echoes sing

blind men deaf
of talk, when feeling
the music writing the wind

The vagabond spells his age

‘Be humbled
by the touch of the ground
before you may seek
the azure embrace of the sky’

I heard an old soul say,
trying to count all of the leaves
from inside the past, in which he’d lost
the future in time, in time
and time again, as if he could recall
all the roots to the letters of his name

with the solecism of numbers,
cosmic in the totem of life’s
one face of moon, concealing
the wrinkled bark of his mask
in age that circles his girth

and stands him in the mast
that now tastes the spelling sea-
now floods in her fathomless depth

from the becoming mouths of land,

After rain

In the eye of every man who has lost,
and in loss, reclaimed
what had began,
begun in him,

the cataract of a name
and face again

Karagita Tree

The lake of mind,

Stagnant algal bloom

branching in bracken waters

Softens the sedimentation

of its view, un tongues color-

until the air is-

a mountain cloud of grounded water

in the blue lagoon of the sky’s memory,

touching the horizon’s question of land

a carcass whistle of fathers,

thronged in oblong bone, chalk-thorned

in the tears of Mother’s  lapping skin,

children rise from the reflex rain

pooling the flecks in our eye,

The fossils of past’s dreamed

And remembered,

in the limpid reflection hewn

below the ochre yellow fall of the limbed

wings of a weaving fever tree

Fear Mongering Clouds

I can hear a child

out of the anaemic silence

of the sun’s warp, daydreaming

in the dark Classroom’s depth

a child,

begot and beaten into learning

how to live behind the blood’s

bottled confusion of skin,

The endless conflict

of a porous bruise,

leaking into morning’s ritual

of Mamas laying out makaa

out of the fire of yesterday,

Hens cluck songs from fear

and men hear the struck screams

of themselves, distantly-

in the choral playground of today’s

concealed imitation of tomorrow,

games are stone scratched

on the sands of the moon, blind

folded hopscotch frames

in which to resolve

But tell me when, when

does one ever grow up?

to become perfectly chiral

to the prism jar, glassed

in the existence

of a hemorrhagic past?